top | item 7654674

Virtual ANS – Simulator of a Russian musical synthesizer from the 1950s

45 points| rits | 12 years ago |warmplace.ru

8 comments

order

pdkl95|12 years ago

I really like NightRadio's work. His main synthesizer, SunVox [1] is amazing. Innovative UI, very good analog-modeling, and a wide assortment of synthesis features. Oh, and it is available on almost any platform you want, most for free.

Also, I suggest checking out the NightRadio's other project, PixiVisor. [2] It converts an image (progressive scan) to audio and back again. This lets you, for example, see an image processed by a reverb effect, resonant LPF or whatever. It does things with the Fourier transform that I would have guessed were impossible.

[1] http://warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/

[2] http://warmplace.ru/soft/pixivisor/

darsham|12 years ago

This is very cool. The core of the code should be pretty simple, here's an article on how to play an image using windowed fft :

http://www.ohmpie.com/imageencode/

Then just add some standard chorus+reverb processing, possibly a bit of distortion.

There are other programs that do this kind of thing (Photosounder, MetaSynth), oddly not so much free software.

As a side note, it's kind of odd that the coloring in this gui lays out the light spectrum with the low frequencies in violet and the high frequencies in red.

erikschoster|12 years ago

> oddly not so much free software

The Analysis & Resynthesis Sound Spectrograph is the closest thing I can think of: http://arss.sourceforge.net It hasn't been updated in a long time but it's still very useful!

Michael Klingbeil's SPEAR is also open source, but a slightly different beast - focused on manipulation of analysis data as a set of partials - it's still insanely useful: http://www.klingbeil.com/spear/

Chris Penrose's excellent Hyperupic was the first tool of this kind I remember encountering, inspired by Xenakis' UPIC system: http://music.columbia.edu/cmc/MusicAndComputers/chapter5/05_... It died with OS9 to the best of my knowledge.

EDIT: Just to say that Alexander Zolotov's work is blowing me away. I didn't realize he was behind SunVox until now, but the portfolio of his projects in this thread is really inspiring.

jweir|12 years ago

The voice recorder (I tried the iOS version) is pretty cool.

The 80s UI in a 2014 app for a 1950s instrument is also great. Nice and weird. I like it.

rasur|12 years ago

Oh now this looks fun! Thank you for posting!